On 3/21/2018 9:06 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Thu, 22 Mar 2018 at 8:57 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 3/21/2018 2:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On Thu, 22 Mar 2018 at 5:45 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 3/20/2018 11:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 9:03 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 3/20/2018 1:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 at 6:34 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 3/20/2018 3:58 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:The interesting thing is that you can draw conclusions about consciousness without being able to define it or detect it.I agree.The claim is that IF an entity is conscious THEN its consciousness will be preserved if brain function is preserved despite changing the brain substrate.Ok, this is computationalism. I also bet on computationalism, but I think we must proceed with caution and not forget that we are just assuming this to be true. Your thought experiment is convincing but is not a proof. You do expose something that I agree with: that non-computationalism sounds silly.But does it sound so silly if we propose substituting a completely different kind of computer, e.g. von Neumann architecture or one that just records everything instead of an episodic associative memory, for the brain. The Church-Turing conjecture says it can compute the same functions. But does it instantiate the same consciousness. My intuition is that it would be "conscious" but in some different way; for example by having the kind of memory you would have if you could review of a movie of any interval in your past. I think it would be conscious in the same way if you replaced neural tissue with a black box that interacted with the surrounding tissue in the same way. It doesn’t matter what is in the black box; it could even work by magic.Then why draw the line at "surrounding tissue". Why not the external enivironment? Keep expanding the part that is replaced and you replace the whole brain and the whole organism. Are you saying you can't imagine being "conscious" but in a different way? I think it is possible but I don’t think it could happen if my neurones were replaced by a functionally equivalent component. If it’s functionally equivalent, my behaviour would be unchanged,I agree with that. But you've already supposed that functional equivalence at the behavior level implies preservation of consciousness. So what I'm considering is replacements in the brain far above the neuron level, say at the level of whole functional groups of the brain, e.g. the visual system, the auditory system, the memory,... Would functional equivalence at the body/brain interface then still imply consciousness equivalence? I think it would, because I don’t think there are isolated consciousness modules in the brain. A large enough change in visual experience will be noticed by the subject, who will report that things look different. This could only happen if there is a change in the input to the language system from the visual system; but we have assumed that the output from the visual system is the same, and only the consciousness has changed, leading to a contradiction.But what about internal systems which are independent of perception...the very reason Bruno wants to talk about dream states. And I'm not necessarily asking that behavior be identical...just that the body/brain interface be the same. The "brain" may be different in how it processes input from the eyeballs and hence report verbally different perceptions. In other words, I'm wondering how much does computationalism constrain consciousness. My intuition is that there could be a lot of difference in consciousness depending on how different perceptual inputs are process and/or merged and how internal simulations are handled. To take a crude example, would it matter if the computer-brain was programmed in a functional language like LISP, an object-oriented language like Ruby, or a neural network? Of course Church-Turing says they all compute the same set of functions, but they don't do it the same way and that might make a difference in consciousness (and at least verbal behavior).If the behaviour of the brain is different then it isn't contentious that consciousness will also be different.
That's certainly true in detail. If I think of writing this email my brain and conscious thoughts are different than if I think about Donal Trump. But it's general quality is the same. On the other hand I can also think in images, which is different. What I'm wondering about is whether, for example a distributed nervous system as in an octopus or in an AI autonomous vehicle is going to be qualitatively different.
The question is whether there would be a difference in consciousness even though the behaviour is the same: for example, if the subroutine controlling an artificial dopamine receptor is written in LISP or in Ruby.
Of course one of the problems we're kind of skimming over is that while neurons maybe the elements of computational thought, it is changes in neurons that likely responsible for memory and it is their response to hormones that implement emotions and motivations.
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